“I have tested the speed of virtually every version of Mac OS X since the release of the public preview of Mac OS X 10.0,” Bill Fox reports for MacsOnly. “Until Lion is out, I expect no real speed differences except, perhaps, in graphics since the drivers package keeps getting updated (e.g. version 1.6.36 in 10.6.8 and 1.6.26 in 10.6.7) so I have only been testing the graphics speed of the past several releases.”
“In my speed test of 10.6.7, it appeared that the graphics speed of Snow Leopard had become slower from 10.6.5 to 10.6.7, especially for my Mac Pro with an ATI Radeon HD 5870 graphics card,” Fox reports. “However, the change, if any, was slight and not significant although consistent among tests. My MacBook Pro with Nvidia 320M graphics showed no change.”
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Fox reports, “I tested 10.6.8 in my 2008 dual quad 2.8GHz Mac Pro with the latest and greatest Mac graphics card, the ATI Radeon HD 5870, and my 2010 2.4GHz 13″ MacBook Pro with Nvidia GeForce 320M graphics… The good news is that OpenGL graphics performance has finally and substantially improved.”
Full article with the benchmark results here.
MacDailyNews Note: Our iMac 32- and 64-bit Geekbench scores running Mac OS X 10.6.7 vs. 10.6.8 (click scores for more details):
Mac OS X 10.6.7:
Mac OS X 10.6.8:
Pretty, pretty, pretty good (and snappy!)
